However, one analyst believes the Aussie beachhead won't be enough for the American tech giant to make a huge impact.

The Oracle data centre, located in a facility managed by Equinix, will provide remotely hosted, subscription-based access to the Oracle Fusion application suite - including enterprise resource planning, human capital management, and sales and marketing - which competes with the CRM software of Salesforce.com.

Oracle will also offer platform services, including cloud database, and "burst capacity", so customers can scale up their computing demands as required.

This is in direct competition to the recently launched Amazon local data centre - also hosted at Equinix.

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Oracle president Mark Hurd said it was the first company to offer a full suite of applications hosted in a local data centre.

"Most companies have released one app: a sales automation app, HR app," according to Hurd, who announced the data centre launch on Tuesday in Sydney.

"We've released a suite of applications that not only work vertically, with a user, but also horizontally, so you can share information between a sales and financial system or an ERP system and a HR system."

Launch customers include financial services company IOOF, Sydney customer management company Wired2Cloud and Perth IT management company SDS Group.

The facility removes the data sovereignty hurdle that stops companies from using cloud services that move the data offshore.

"We're trying to take away all the concerns that customers could have in the delivery architectures of the technology and focus on the intellectual property," Hurd said

Telsyte analyst Rodney Gedda said that while customers were genuinely concerned by the issue of data sovereignty, there were other issues threatening the success of Oracle's data centre, including the efficiency of other cloud software providers.

"It's one of the pillars but there are so many other factors," Gedda said.

"Oracle still has to compete with the Salesforce.com delivery model. The Oracle delivery model is based around product services and support, but there's a radical change to go to cloud and offer low price, per-user per-month subscription.

"To woo Australian Salesforce.com customers, such as Telstra or Commbank, it has to be more than just a case of 'we host the data locally'.

"You get entrenched to using a SaaS app in your business and the process is difficult to change."

Oracle had already failed to match the open disclosure that others provide around subscription fees, he said.

Salesforce.com said its Enterprise level CRM software costs $US180 per user per month, information which can be easily found on its website.